Bloodletting from the ankle vein to treat sciatic pain.

The most renowned physicians through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance up to the Modern practiced bloodletting from the “sciatic vein” (saphena minor or small saphenous vein, which runs behind or under the external ankle) as a cure for sciatic pain. Here we review historic descriptions of this procedure carefully selected from medical literature in Latin language from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and hazard a guess as to why phlebotomy of the sciatic or saphenous veins was conceived of as a possible remedy.